Making an impact with high-tech accident prevention
In a complex, fast-paced world of vehicles, road infrastructures and heavy industry, accidents of all sorts, such as collisions or car crashes, are bound to happen. Today's sophisticated imaging technology can help understand the exact impact of any such accident, an important step in developing better materials and designing improved processes to help avoid accidents. The EU-funded ′Advanced dynamic validations using integrated simulation and experimentation′ (Advise) project aims to accurately measure strain and deformation (breaking, bending, etc.) in live simulations. This will allow industry and product or process designers to pre-empt accidents through better understanding, an initiative that is particularly useful in the transportation sector. Advances in optical techniques for measuring deformation have been combined with recent ones in modelling the impact of two- and three-dimensional composite structures. Composites are tough hybrid materials that are meant to withstand strain. On the basis of this, Advise is planning to deliver recommendations on improving image-based methods of deformation measurement and to propose better ways for optical measurement and computational modelling. The project aims to draft standards for the experimental validation of accident simulations. While best practice guides exist for numerical modelling and static measurements of stress and strain, there are no international standards for analysing data from dynamic experiments. This approach is necessary to validate numerical results in stress, vibration and impact response, i.e. to correlate finite element results with experimental observations. The Advise team includes experts from research laboratories, universities, instrument suppliers, and companies from the aerospace and automotive industry. Such a multifaceted group will be able to shed light on different aspects of measuring deformation and strain accurately. Once Advise completes its mandate, it will disseminate standardised procedures that allow safety levels to be defined in a much more accurate way. The information has strong potential in raising safety standards and saving lives, particularly in transport and industry.
